Cyberfeminism
envisioned the Internet as a new frontier beyond the oppressive
bodily boundaries of race and gender where
new understandings
of identity could take root. Cyberspace was going to be the stage
of cultural transformation! We were all going to be super-cool
cybernetic
avatars, existing in multiple dimensions with boundless potential.
Sadly, all we ended up getting was a bunch of porn and misogynistic
cybermobs. (Perhaps feminism has emerged with renewed relevance,
because the Internet has actually worked to regressively reinvigorate
damaging
conceptions of gender and promote hateful divisions.)

But
then again, it’s undeniable that the Internet really has
been nothing short of culturally transformative. Communication
technologies have become woven into the very fabric of personhood.
With companies
increasingly making employees sign “social media contracts” holding
them professionally accountable for their online presence, digital
identities are gaining recognition for their representative authority.

Our
Facebook profile pictures have symbolic weight, strengthened
through the repetitive labor of association. Have you ever changed
your Facebook
profile picture and not really liked it — but then, after
a while, decided it was awesome? Like our face in the mirror
after a weird new
haircut, we need time to readjust our self-image through repeated
association.

It
may not be as cool as we imagined it in sleek ’90s
sci-fi, but we really are creatures existing in multiple dimensions,
transcending
space and time with our cybernetic reach. And who controls
where your body ends and begins as this unholy fusion of man
and machine?
Those
technologies through which you interface, of course, offering
you the shape of your digital self, such as the Facebook profile.
Sometimes
the reduction of your person to Facebook’s arbitrary
determinations can be uncomfortable and insulting.

Facebook
has redefined the standard of what information should
be immediately known about you as a person. It was a slow
process, where
it gradually
increased the “About” fields, but now when I
meet someone, it is somehow appropriate for me to see their
exact
age, residential
history and entire résumé of work experience
and education. (No, Facebook, I don’t want to display
where I went to high school. Stop trying to guess at it!)

Facebook
can even reduce your personal
journey on this earth to a chronological list of “Life
Events.” It
knows the true measure of what’s important in this
crazy world and can tell you everything noteworthy that’s
happened to you in this one helpful list. Facebook has
turned our lives
inside out
to the point where all of this very specific information
now seems to be what constitutes a social identity.

(The
Facebook generation has gotten so bad that I’ve
had to tell friends to inform me when they are making
a recording
of our conversation,
and to not post my complete address online when they
tag a photo of themselves at my house.)

What
was once nebulous and unknown about a life is now
defined and categorized in this culture of hyper-transparency.
It
is little wonder
why the journalistic coverage of Facebook’s recent “real
name policy” scandal was as uncritical as it
was in accepting of Facebook’s legitimate right
to the verification of users’ legal
names.

In
case you didn’t hear, Facebook was demanding
everyone to use their “real names” on
their profiles, which they defined as their legal
names.
Users were shut out of their accounts if they
were suspected of being untruthful, and only allowed
back in once they uploaded a copy of legal ID. Journalistic
outrage over the event largely
took a defensive position reporting on why certain
people who do not use their legal names on Facebook
are not being duplicitous, but have
legitimate reasons for their actions. Articles documented
cases, such as individuals who are transgendered,
or victims of abusive relationships.

Mark
Zuckerberg has repeatedly affirmed that we only
have one identity, and that the idea of having
multiple constitutes
a “lack of integrity.” Thus,
Facebook has promoted a policy of authenticity,
where everyone uses their “real name” under
the banner of keeping everyone safe. Sounds familiar?
If you are an American, you should know by now
that invasions of your privacy are only for your
own good!

Thus
Facebook’s policy is viewed
as legitimate, rather than hilarious, when it
includes bullet points such as: “Pretending to be
anything or anyone isn’t allowed.” That’s
right, you must know the truth of your nature
before you post anything on Facebook,
and all posts must reflect this authentic self.
Facebook’s technology
is causing an existential shift in what we consider
to be our personal identities, and how we interact
in the world. This shift is caused
by not only the material form of their technology,
such as the “About” fields,
but also by the discourse surrounding it.

There
are great ideological stakes when asking, “What
is your realname?” We are essentially asking: “What
definitively constitutes a person?”
Historically, identification technologies have
served to consolidate people as objects of
knowledge into
discrete political units.
Their regulation is then easily rationalized
and demonstrably justified.
The question of what should be done with you
is much easier
to answer when we can definitively say what
you are.

The
crux of the issue boils down to this: Is Facebook’s normalization
of hyper-transparency and information-oriented
mode of self-definition conditioning young people to be submissive
toward institutionalized
forms of subject formation? Does it quell
unrest in response to those power structures invested in telling
you who and
what you are? Will
the young people of the future question social
values if they are trained from a young age by technological demands
to express their person in
a corporately constructed template?

The
outlook appears grim when the current conversation surrounding
identity
on the
Web has been reduced
to an impoverished debate
weighing the importance between “safety” (real
names + accountability) and “anonymity” (freedom
of speech in theory, but trolls in practice).

However,
there is still something interesting
occurring in the wake of Facebook’s “real
name policy” scandal. Facebook
apologized for conflating legal names
with “real
names” and
conceded that a legitimate identity may
not be constituted by the name you were
given at birth. Although Facebook failed
to directly apologize
to the members of the LGBTQ community
disproportionately affected by the incident,
Facebook’s
concession is, in a sense, a deployment
of Trans politics. The conceptual implications
of their policy change are: somewhere,
somehow, over the course of life, you
go through a
process of becoming, and your true identity
may be something more elusive than what
can be verified by a government document.

A
rift has opened in Facebook’s
discourse of “authenticity” and “safety.” And
what do you know … It’s
starting to look like something out
of cyberfeminism!
The revelation of this chink in their
ideological
armor is actually strangely reminiscent
of cyber-feminist prophesies, such
as Donna Haraway’s iconic “Cyborg
Manifesto.” Haraway
famously argues that essentialist ideologies
would be revealed as inadequate in
a complex world where nature fuses
with
the artificial; thus overflowing
the boundaries of the conceptual regimes
used to justify their regulation.

We’ve
just witnessed exactly this occurring
in the politics of Facebook. The company
relied on a certain understanding of
authenticity,
which was revealed by complex subjectivities
interwoven with technology to be a
gross oversimplification. Facebook
then lost the justification
for their power to regulate and was
forced to open their concepts to an
amorphous process of reconfiguration.
As Facebook scrambles to “update” how
they verify “real names,” how
will this technological giant redefine
its reality.